Gotterdammerung.

Payne froze, the familiar voice popping into his thoughts. His staff and students were in the midst of bundling into vans and mini-buses alongside SEELIE cadets, everyone tired from the day’s escalating crisis. If only they realised, as Payne now did, just how it was going to end. He wanted to call out, to cry at Garland to stop and reconsider his choice, but all he could do was take a sharp intake of breath and swivel to face the direction of the manor.

He felt it first in the winds of the world’s chi: a calmness in the currents of ethereal matter like the sea before a tsunami. Then there was the flash and a high-pitched screeching, followed by the thundering ripples of distortion that alerted his more sensitive associates to what was about to happen. On the material plane the spell was manifesting as a sphere of growing light consuming the heart of Godhand’s base and its half-finished clock tower. It remained for a second, a swirling mass of magical energy as bright as the moon, then imploded with a sudden silence.

Payne felt every muscle in his body tense up. The silence was soon penetrated by the sound of the clock tower collapsing. Several of his staff stood by him, having noticed Garland’s final trump card and he felt Amber Thorburn’s hand brush against his arm. She understood what had just happened. Twenty years or so ago, she’d predicted it: ‘one will sacrifice their life for the other‘ or something to that effect. Back then everyone laughed at the idea of Payne or Garland doing anything so drastic for their eternal rival, but Amber’s gloomiest predictions always had a habit of coming true, as if the future really was predetermined.

“What the hell kinda power was that?” asked Brian Smith, “Some kind of nuke?”

“That was some awesome destructive alchemy!” said Ms James, herself skilled in the art of altering physical matter, “By the looks of it, all physical matter in that sphere should’ve been disintegrated; a total transmutational meltdown! Wow, I’m dead jealous!”

Amber’s hand tightened on Payne’s bicep. His staff didn’t – couldn’t – understand. After all these years, Garland had taken his secret talent for disintegrating matter via alchemy to its human limits. The boy who’d called himself ‘Wotan’ and Payne ‘Siegfried’. The student who had always surpassed him, but never put his abilities to constructive use. The rebel who had abandoned the SEELIE and fought his own war. The man who had embraced Godhand in order to destroy it. A mage who had honed his skills to such a degree that he could perform an incredible form of transmutation at the cost of his own life.

Payne trembled, then turned and continued with the evacuation. The final page had turned and; from here on, a new story would begin.

***

I’m sorry, Astrid.

Astrid stumbled over a root and caught herself on the nearest branch, before looking back at the manor, now just a cradle of ruins marked by a tower of smoke. Before she had a moment to contemplate what was happening, her eyes began to water up.

“What’s up?” asked Elizabeth.

Remember your mother. Become strong, like she was.

A chill swept up through her body and turned her muscles to jelly. Her body collapsed, bare knees scraping against rough ground, and she sobbed into her hands. Elizabeth and Vespa didn’t have time to react before the piercing sound came, like all the winds in the word were being sucked to a single point. Between the trees the sky lit up as a sphere of light grew in the midst of the manor before vanishing just as suddenly as it appeared.

Elizabeth gasped. “Oh my God! W-was that a bomb?”

“By the Saint,” whispered Vespa, “Divine Judgement…”

Astrid couldn’t care less whether it was a weapon or magic or a demon or holy intervention – all she wanted was for her father to speak to her head again. Anything, she didn’t care what, just so long as she heard his voice again.

But all she heard was her own sorrow.

***

Chapter 24
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